Normand, David (Tom)

ORAL HISTORY OF DAVID (TOM) NORMAND
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 19, 2013
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is November 19, 2013. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mr. Tom Normand, 108 Plymouth Circle, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take his oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Tom, please state your full name, place of birth, and date.
MR. NORMAND: David Thomas Normand. I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, May 5, 1931. Then we moved immediately to Harrisonburg, Virginia. My father was a professor at what is now James Madison University. At that time, it was Harrisonburg Normal School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and place of birth?
MR. NORMAND: Charles Ernest Normand, born in Belton, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do remember the date?
MR. NORMAND: He was born probably in 1896, I believe.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your mother’s maiden name? Do remember her place of birth and date?
MR. NORMAND: Her name was Hazel Lucille Major, and she was born out in Ogden, Utah; but she lived in Paris, Missouri, most of her life. She was also – she had a master’s degree in home economics. Dad got his bachelor’s and master’s in physics from the University of Texas the same day. Then he went from there to the University of California at Berkeley and got his PhD in physics in 1930, after which he started teaching in Virginia at Harrisonburg. Then we left there and went to Denton, Texas, and he taught at what was then known as Texas State College for Women. It’s now Texas Women’s University, which is just north of Fort Worth. Pearl Harbor hit December 1941. The phone started ringing, and the people from Berkeley – Oppenheimer and Brody and C.L. Lawrence, who Dad had studied under – were calling him. Before the month was over, he was in Berkeley at their radiation laboratory. That’s where they developed the cyclotron. We went – the family, we – went out in January 1942 to Berkeley. We stayed there a year and a half, and we came back to Denton, Texas. They wanted us there that summer so we would be from Texas and not from California – some kind of security thinking. We came to East Tennessee in July 1943 and moved into a cottage in Gatlinburg – the Northside Cottages – and we lived there for six weeks, waiting on a house to be completed in Oak Ridge, which we moved back into a D house at 108 East Geneva Lane at the end of August 1943. There was my twin brother, who is deceased; and my sister, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back you up just a little bit. Do you remember your grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ names on both sides of the family?
MR. NORMAND: No. I don’t. My dad’s dad, of course, was Normand. His wife – I don’t remember them at all. My mother – her name was Major. She was – I’ll think of it in a minute. I know her name, too. It will come to me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’ll come to you. Do you recall how your parents met?
MR. NORMAND: No, they were both teaching in Missouri.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned family. You have brothers and sisters?
MR. NORMAND: I had a brother. He died. And I have a sister, who retired and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are their names?
MR. NORMAND: My brother was Charles Elliott Normand, and my sister was Mary Major Normand. She married a man named Drake Bush, whose mother taught here in Oak Ridge schools at one time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where do you fall in the age of the siblings? Are you the oldest or the littlest?
MR. NORMAND: I am the oldest. My brother and I were twins – identical twins. I’m 82, and my sister is 77.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about school before coming to Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: I went to a little school there in Denton, Texas. The best school was in California in Berkeley. It was much advanced and not as country, so to speak – in Berkeley, Calif. Then we came here – interestingly we enrolled. We walked from East Geneva. The Service Drugstore was there on the corner, which is now Big Ed’s. The Ridge Theater was there, which I guess – I don’t know what it is right today, but those two were the only two buildings there. Then there was a big pit – mud hole – from there all the way up to Jackson Square, and Jackson Square was where you had the A&P store and drugstore and so forth. Across the square, there was a bank – a Hamilton National Bank. Next to it was a beer joint. It was open 24 hours a day, and that’s where we registered for school. It was in the lobby of that little narrow beer parlor, which later became Hall’s Shoe Store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you went to school in California, what do you remember about the classrooms and the teachers? Do you recall any of that?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – they were very nice. We had afterschool activities, all kinds of athletics. They had a big nice playground. It was much more modern than anything I had had a Denton, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What age were you when you went to…?
MR. NORMAND: 12 years old. No, sorry – I was 10 years old when I went to California in 1942.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in Denton, Texas – your education level versus when you went to California, were you ahead, behind…?
MR. NORMAND: They had moved us ahead a year in Texas because I guess they went from 11 grades to 12, and so we had been double-promoted, so to speak. When we got to California, my mother put us back in our age. Instead of being in the seventh grade, I was in sixth grade, which was okay. I didn’t know the difference.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother being a teacher, was she hard on you about you keeping up your grades and your schooling?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t consider that. I felt like she was hard, but that’s what we did. It was just part of everything – everyday life.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What you remember about when you lived in Texas during the summer time? What do you remember doing as far as fun?
MR. NORMAND: Riding horses. The college had a stable, and we would go – we had privileges. I would go out there and just work as a stable hand – feeding horses, saddling them, taking the saddles off, taking care of them, and riding. The instructor was named Branch Williams, and at that time she and her family owned the largest Shetland pony farm in the world. We would go out and ride horses all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you went to California? What kind of activity that you do?
MR. NORMAND: We didn’t have any horses, of course. We went to camps. I went to a camp. I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge with my dad. When it was Show-and-Tell – I told them I went to Valley Joe, and of course that start out to be Vallejo. It got a big chuckle out of the crowd.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about what you remember walking across the Golden Gate Bridge.
MR. NORMAND: I walked across it and thought it would be nice to dive off. I figured you could. But, of course, you couldn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I doubt if the traffic flow was as much in those days as it is today.
MR. NORMAND: Of course not. They wouldn’t be anywhere near that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about transportation when you lived in California? How did the family get around?
MR. NORMAND: Well, we had a car. We had a 1936 Dodge. We got it out there, and we used it. The house we rented was on Oxford Street, which ran right straight down into the University of Berkeley – right into the Campanile into the football field and so forth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did any of the scientists that your father worked with ever come to the home and visit?
MR. NORMAND: Well, I remember Oppenheimer, and E.O. Lawrence, and a man named it – I can’t think of his first name – Brody. They were all part of my dad’s instructors and workers. I know Oppenheimer and Lawrence have been to Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This is true. Do you remember what type of people they were? At your age did you…?
MR. NORMAND: No, they were just men that came in. You know…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family know anything about what your father was doing?
MR. NORMAND: No, and boy, oh boy – my brother and I were reading a big – one of those Big Little Books – about yea and that thick. I think they call them Big Little Books, not comic books. Somewhere in there was the word “cyclotron,” and we mentioned that. Boy oh boy – my dad in his very calm way had myself come in and my brother come in separately to the living room, and we talked about the book and found out where it was because he was very concerned that maybe he had let the word slip during a conversation, which was not the case at all. We picked it up in that Big Little Book. I wish I still had it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were your parents strict with the children?
MR. NORMAND: They were not real, real strict. We had quite a bit of latitude. They wanted to trust us, and they did. But we were always – so they knew where we were, and we were home when we were supposed to be. We did our chores, we did our homework. He was raised on a farm – a poor farm in Texas, and everybody had a job to do. That’s the way it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When the family left California, tell me again where the family went to before coming to Oak Ridge.
MR. NORMAND: Dad came directly to Oak Ridge. He got here in March 1943, moved into a dormitory. We went back, and that was interesting. We rode out on a train and came back on a train. It was a treat for us kids because we could order anything we wanted in the dining car, and we did. Everybody looked right after us. We went back to Denton. As soon as we could, we got cabin in Gatlinburg, and came there. I was 12 years old then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did the family get to Gatlinburg from Denton?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t remember. I assume we drove. I assume Dad had a moving van and moved the furniture or the government did. They sent us – we rode a train – you know, I don’t remember whether we had the car out in Berkeley or not because we never – yeah, we had a car. Interestingly, on the train when we arrived in Berkeley in January 1943 – who was Glenn Van Slyck’s main man, that had a car lot? Zach Carringer – Zach Carringer met us at the train station to take us to our house in Berkeley, Calif., when we arrived in Berkeley. He was already there – the government had already had him there to meet the family – my mother and sister and brother and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Whereabouts in Gatlinburg do you remember the house was – the cabin was that you lived in?
MR. NORMAND: North Side Cottages, which you turn left to go up toward Newport.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Have you been by there? Is that facility still there?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. It’s still there. I’ve never gone in and gone through the cabin again, but it’s there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What kind of memories you have living there?
MR. NORMAND: It was fun more than anything else. We would get into muscadine vines and grapes, and we rode horses. They had horses on the main drag then to rent, and we did some of that. That’s basically it. We were only there six weeks, and it was in August – the main month of July and August. Then we got a house here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In that time, was Gatlinburg populated a lot?
MR. NORMAND: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was a just a few stores and that’s about it?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, Ogles was the main store downtown, and Dad would come up every Wednesday and every weekend and be with us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what dormitory your father lived in?
MR. NORMAND: No, but it was one right down there off of Central. It wasn’t one of the ladies’, but it was right there were they were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the family moved to Oak Ridge in the D house. Tell me what a D house looked like in those days.
MR. NORMAND: It was just more of a rectangular shape – three bedrooms. Ours had one bath, but it had plumbing for a second bath, which came later. Today the design – I guess Stone Webster did it. It’s still as popular a design for homes as there is probably anywhere. I would like to have thought I designed the house in 1942 or ‘43 that would still be popular 70 years later. Wouldn’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Absolutely. Do you remember how the house was heated?
MR. NORMAND: Coal furnace.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get the coal?
MR. NORMAND: They delivered it. The government delivered it. They brought a truck full of coal with a chute and would run that chute into the coal bin, and it was the door and the bin in the furnace room, and they would fill that up. They would go onto the next house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The door was outside toward the street so that they…?
MR. NORMAND: Right, and that’s why so many of the cemestos those were built right on the street, so they could get the coal without any problem.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do with the ashes out of the coal? Do you remember?
MR. NORMAND: Dad did something with them. We shoveled them and put them in a bucket and put them outside. I think we threw ours down in the woods.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s probably what most all people did.
MR. NORMAND: There was a lot of woods right behind our house. There was woods everywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of flooring was in the house?
MR. NORMAND: All of them had hardwood floors.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you share a bedroom?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, with my brother – I sure did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How close is East Geneva from Jackson Square would you say?
MR. NORMAND: It’s just right down the – it’s wherever you want to start Jackson Square. Do you want to start it up at the actual Jackson Square? I would say it’s quarter of a mile. It wasn’t a long way. Then the high school was right up above Jackson Square – the original high school. We went to Elm Grove, which was the first grade school opened in Oak Ridge. It was still being under construction and the window [inaudible] so we could hear. They would make their turn go way down, and turn and come back, and we would pause again.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What grades did you attend?
MR. NORMAND: I was in the seventh, and then I went into eighth. Then we went to Jefferson Junior as a big senior in junior high in the ninth grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Jefferson located?
MR. NORMAND: It’s where Robertsville is today – where Robertsville Middle School is. That was Jefferson Junior, the only junior high school in town. Then we went from there to the high school, which was on the hill above Jackson Square above the football field.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me what you remember about the Jefferson Junior High down at Robertsville.
MR. NORMAND: It was an old building to begin with, and they added some rooms to it. It was nice as far as I’m concerned. We had good teachers and enjoyed it. It had a gymnasium. It was a small gym, but – Nick Orlando was there. I’ll think of it in a minute – maybe the other…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bob Stuhmiller?
MR. NORMAND: Bob Stuhmiller – yeah, he was there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The old facility was the old Robertsville School that was here before Oak Ridge. Do you remember anything unique about that building?
MR. NORMAND: It was an old stone building, had a lot of steps you had to go up to get into the front door. I remember a lady – our teacher, her name was Miss Edwards, and her son was a national news commentator. I don’t remember his name, but it was Edwards. She was quite a celebrity for us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about fire escapes? Do you remember anything unique about the fire escape when you went?
MR. NORMAND: It had one on the outside. It was in the ladder. It was a chute, as I recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever go down the chute?
MR. NORMAND: Probably playing in it. I probably did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to Elm Grove School a little bit. What do you remember in the school at Elm Grove as far as your dress when you went to school – what you wore versus when you went to California or Texas?
MR. NORMAND: Well, when I left Texas, we thought we were really uptown. We had brand-new corduroys on and everything, and all we got was laughs. That wasn’t what they wore in California. What they wore, I don’t remember, but it wasn’t corduroys and it wasn’t cowboy boots. We had changed, but when you came to Oak Ridge that’s another story. Everybody was from somewhere else. There weren’t any cliques. There weren’t any better people, poorer people – everybody in the same boat, everybody from somewhere else. We were all equal, and we all got along that way. It was so interesting. We had I think 20-some, we will use a number – 26 students in the first class, and they were 25 different states represented. The reason there were 25 is because my brother and I were both from Texas. But it was that type of a melting pot. It was interesting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember your teachers’ names at Elm Grove?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, Miss Stratton. She later became – I forget her last name now. But she was our teacher, and we had Alice Lyman, who was our music group who stayed in Oak Ridge for years. It was a good, nice group of people – good teachers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you think the school work was harder or about the same or less than when you came from California and Texas?
MR. NORMAND: Now that’s a good question. I never did – we worked about the same amount as far as applying toward homework as we did everywhere because my mother and father were both educators and had both taught college mainly, and they expected us to do a certain level. I’m sure I didn’t live up to their full expectations, but we had our homework done.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like to go to school?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – sure. I enjoyed it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During the summertime when you first came to Oak Ridge in the early days, what did you do for fun and activities when you were growing up then?
MR. NORMAND: Well, when we first got here, we were about 13, and I went to Boy Scout camp three years – once as a camper, and twice continued as a counselor and working in the Waterfront Development, teaching the lifesaving and water safety merit badges, and worked as counselor at Camp Pellissippi up on Norris Lake. And then I eventually started carrying papers – newspapers, delivered them. I delivered – back then, there were so many people coming in. I would deliver routes; build it up to say 100. They would take 50 away. I’d build it back up in another two weeks to 100 because there were so many new people coming in. I had Trevose Lane, which is the – Ed Wescott was one of my customers. He, even to this day, remembers that I was his paperboy. I remembered him fondly. It just – there were headaches to it because people were moving in and out without paying you, and you had to collect from your customers. That wasn’t easy. So when I was 12-years-old, which is when I came, I went to work down at the bowling alley. They had a bowling alley underneath where the Soup Kitchen is today. It was under there. I was setting pins for 8 cents a line. They made me quit because I didn’t have a social security number. That’s where I got my first social security card.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who ran the bowling lanes in those days?
MR. NORMAND: No, I didn’t work there a long time. I was a little small. I hadn’t grown yet. I’d set doubles, and it kind of got to a big old heavy ball and plink pins. It was more than I really needed.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get the job?
MR. NORMAND: I guess I went down there and talked to him, or had a friend that talked me into it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about setting pins. How did you do that?
MR. NORMAND: Man, strictly gathering them up in your hands and throwing them in the rack and hopping to the next one, and doing the same thing, and trying to dodge when the ball would come and the pins would fly – not trying to dodge the pins. It wasn’t a lot of fun. We didn’t have any automatic pin-setters. You’d throw them in the rack, and then you’d have to press it down to set them on there and release it. For a little fellow, it wasn’t too easy. Then I took advantage of the swimming pool, and I started working at the Oak Ridge swimming pool as a basket room attendant. I got my – when I got a little bit older, I got my senior – junior and senior lifesaving. I started helping out with the teaching program, and I was teaching. And the Red Cross paid my way and sent me to national aquatic school in Brevard, North Carolina, when I was 18. You had to be 18 to be a water safety instructor – to get my water safety instructor’s job. I headed that Red Cross program for three years – the largest swimming program in the nation. We had an excellent program at the Oak Ridge pool, and I was a lifeguard then. I had gotten over and I was a lifeguard. I went into the Marine Corps and got out in 1952, came back and was head lifeguard. Then I was the manager when we integrated. The previous manager didn’t want that job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back up and explained to me what a basket – what did you say?
MR. NORMAND: A basket room attendant. People would come in and they would get a basket – a metal basket, and it would have a tag on it that you would slip on your wrist or ankle, and you get dressed. That’s where you would put your clothes. You would put the basket back to the basket room attendant, and he would put it up and a number. They keep your clothes for you. You can get out of the swimming hole, and then you come and get your clothes and re-dress and turn the basket in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If I remember right, it was the little elastic sort of band that had the round number on it.
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What else do you remember unique about the Oak Ridge swimming pool?
MR. NORMAND: Well, it was fed by spring, and it was cold water.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall down on the west end of the pool outside ever being an eating facility or maybe a little carnival rise or something of that nature?
MR. NORMAND: They had a diner out there as I recall – not originally. Originally it was wooden. Then when they built the swimming pool – put in the men and women’s bathhouses, they had stuff there, but they really had the food area up on the backside of the pool toward the road, where the boilers were inside the building, the change house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work there before they concreted the pool? It was just more about…
MR. NORMAND: One year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mud bottom?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, and it was a plastic or mud bottom. That was the first year I worked there, which was probably 1946 or 1947. Then they concreted it in and put in the chlorinators and all the pumps, which were right behind the diving boards – the chlorinator. We had filters – huge filters. We would have to wash them occasionally – flush them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how much it cost to go swimming?
MR. NORMAND: 9 cents – I believe. That’s what it cost to go to the movie. It might’ve been 12 or 14 cents or 15. It wasn’t expensive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you working at the pool when they had what I call entertainment, where some guys would dress up like clowns and jump off the diving board?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. I was part of that on occasion. I wasn’t as good as some of the others. Some of them were very good. They put on a clown act, dress up, get on top of the high board, stagger around, fall off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who those fellows were?
MR. NORMAND: There was Bobby Seifred was one that did that. I don’t remember for sure – Mac Preston.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to the home life. Do you remember where your mother did her grocery shopping?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, the only place we had. That was the A&P store there at Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the community store being there in the square as well?
MR. NORMAND: There was a community store. Was it at Jackson Square?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yeah. It was up in the corner on the square, where Razzleberry’s is today.
MR. NORMAND: Okay, well – then that’s where she did her shopping.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The A&P was down …
MR. NORMAND: The A&P was down further. You see, in those days Elm Grover had a little shopping center. Outer Drive had a little shopping center. Pine Valley had a little shopping center. Each one of these little shopping centers had a one-truck fire hall, a drugstore, a grocery store, a men and women’s hair salon. There was one across the street from Elm Grove School, one across from Pine Valley. There was not one up at Cedar Hill, but there was one on Outer Drive – Outer Drive Shopping Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go with your mother when she did her grocery shopping?
MR. NORMAND: Sometimes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember standing in line for certain items?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. You’d have to. My uncle – my mother’s brother – was a bird colonel in the Army. When he would come, we would get treats because he could go to the PX – I guess they called it – where the Army was stationed, and could get things that we couldn’t buy. They weren’t available. So we wanted Uncle Earl to come all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family have a car in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. We had a 1936 Dodge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your father got back and forth to work?
MR. NORMAND: He drove it sometimes. Then he was in a car pool – mainly a car pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What facility did he work at?
MR. NORMAND: Y-12. He worked for Oak Ridge National Lab, but in the Y-12 area.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned earlier that Oppenheimer came to Oak Ridge, as well as Ferme and some of the other people. Did any of those come and visit the family?
MR. NORMAND: That I don’t know. I’m not positive whether – I would think they did – Oppenheimer and – I can't even think of the other one’s names. Not Ferme…
MR. HUNNICUTT: E.O. Lawrence?
MR. NORMAND: E.O. Lawrence.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about when you went to Jefferson? How many grades were at Jefferson before you went to the high school?
MR. NORMAND: Just the one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ninth grade?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. We were the ninth grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then you went to the high school, which was above Jackson Square on Kentucky Avenue. What was the difference when you left junior high and you went to high school?
MR. NORMAND: Well, not a whole lot. I was trying to be a football player, and all I was was fodder, but I did dress out and go every day. Then I also played in the band. I played a baritone horn – in the high school band. So I did both while I was in school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was the band director at that time?
MR. NORMAND: Good question. I thought you might ask, and I don’t know. I know Miss Lymon was down at the junior high.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, Mr. Scarborough was the band director …
MR. NORMAND: That’s who it was – Prop Scarborough. We called him Prop.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now in high school, they offered shop classes. Did you take any of those?
MR. NORMAND: No. They offered it – yes, but I didn’t take any.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was the football coach?
MR. NORMAND: Ben Martin, and then [Buste] Warren. He had just graduated from Tennessee and was a tailback for them. He came, and that’s when we graduated.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that you graduated?
MR. NORMAND: 1949.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the 1949 football team – some of the players on that team?
MR. NORMAND: This would have been the 1948 team.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Or 1948?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah – Buddy Pope, Bebe Hopkins, Bob Geiser, Dick Williams. I remember several of them – Tom Twitty.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What position did you play?
MR. NORMAND: I tried to play linebacker and fullback.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you get to play much?
MR. NORMAND: No. I didn’t play much and didn’t get to …
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember traveling to any of the away games?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. We would go to some of the away games – not very far. We would go to Clinton and Oliver Springs. I think we played – I’m sure we did – Lafollette. And we’d play Rule High School in Knoxville and [Stairtech] in Knoxville and things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In those days, the city was fenced in. Security was very high. My understanding is that children and parents had to have security ID badges.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe above the age of – was it 13 or 12?
MR. NORMAND: When I first came, I had one. I was 12, so maybe that’s what it was. The badges were just picture badges with your number on them. I’ve heard somebody tell somebody on the train out there that you ride, and that there were different colored badges, and you couldn’t even go from one section of town to the other, which wasn’t true at all. We played – Elm Grove played Linden, which was about as far west as you could get. You know – different schools, different playgrounds.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, what was the requirement with that badge? Did you have to wear it only when you went out of town?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. It was for to go in and out of the gate. They may have wanted us to wear it all the time, but we didn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned the elementary schools playing each other. Was that during the summer programs?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What kind of games did you play?
MR. NORMAND: Softball mainly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Each elementary school had a summer program for children?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Other than softball, what were some of the other things they offered?
MR. NORMAND: Well, that’s really about – I didn’t partake in whole lot of it for the simple reason I was in [bob moring] swimming. I was at the pool or up at Camp Pellissippi on Norris Lake.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back to the ID badge. Do you remember where your family had to go to get that badge?
MR. NORMAND: Right down there where my nephew’s law office is today, which is known as the Town Hall building. We went right down there. They would take your picture, give you the badge, and off you’d go.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the badge was just made right on spot while you waited?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm, as I recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what your number was?
MR. NORMAND: I had a low number at one time – 329.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That is low. Did you ride the bus system much in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. That’s the only way we got – that or ride our bicycles or walk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you first moved in on East Geneva, were the roads paved or were they just tar and gravel?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, no. They were not – they were gravel and mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the boardwalks? Tell me about the boardwalks.
MR. NORMAND: They were everywhere through the woods. At the end of East Geneva, why you’d pick up a boardwalk, and you could even go north all the way up to the top of Georgia – well, to Gorgas Lane, which was the last lane on the right. You could turn off and go to Forest Lane off Florida. You could turn onto Faunce and Fairview, and come out down on Fairview. That’s the main ones I knew about because that’s where I lived, you know. They didn’t have a boardwalk all the way – you’d have to go to Tennessee Avenue to walk to Elm Grove. Of course, we could walk through people’s yards, and they didn’t mind. Nobody owned anything. You know, all the houses were government-owned.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That brings up an interesting thing that I’ve heard about when they was building the houses in that area. Kids would go to Elm Grove like you, and they was building houses so fast. When you came home, sometimes you’d get lost because the houses went up and you didn’t recognize.
MR. NORMAND: That’s true. They were putting them up – and awful lot of houses every day, new ones. They started in the east end. Then, as you know, they laid Oak Ridge out with the alphabet. The A streets were all on the east end, and they graduated until they got to Pennsylvania. That was the furthest on the west end – was the P’s. I’m talking about for cemestos. They would have flattops on West Outer Drive and down on Hillside and off of Hillside and so forth. But all the cemestos started on California actually. Those in East Village weren’t cemestos, as I recall – not an A, B, C, or D, or F. They were something else, and I don’t know what.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They were G’s and H’s.
MR. NORMAND: Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They didn’t have a chimney out the top – a fireplace.
MR. NORMAND: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They were normally by the Glenwood Baptist Church …
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Riding the bus system, where did you go to catch the bus if you were going somewhere in town?
MR. NORMAND: About anywhere. And they were pretty much free. You could hop on a bus anywhere. They had them running all over town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have transfers that you could go from one bus to another?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. If you needed one – I don’t remember riding the bus very often, to tell you the truth. I’m not sure how I got from East Geneva down to Jefferson Junior. I’m sure it was a school bus that came and picked us up in our neighborhood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what times you had to be at school and what times school got out?
MR. NORMAND: We started at 8 a.m. That was what I recall. We got through at around 3.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were going to Jefferson down at Robertsville, you mentioned they had a cafeteria. Did you buy food there? Or did you take your lunch?
MR. NORMAND: I guess we did both. I ate an awful lot of tuna fish and cheese sandwiches made at home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother washed her clothes when you first came to Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: No. I’m sure we had a washer – and old ringer type; and probably had it hooked up in the utility room.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hung the clothes outside?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. The town was opened in March of 1949 when they opened the gates. So people could start coming in and out then. But there wasn’t any private property until – what? – 1955.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall going to the indoor movie theaters?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. I worked at the Ridge Theater. And I could get in – like I said, I was small. I would get in for 9 cents until I was 14.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your job at the Ridge Theater?
MR. NORMAND: I was an usher and ticket-taker.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are the duties of an usher? What do they do?
MR. NORMAND: Just try to keep people from causing disturbances and keeping people from enjoying the movie. We’d have a flashlight and help anybody that needed to see. Then we’d take up tickets at the front, and then the same thing at the Center Theater, which was in Jackson Square. I only worked at those two theaters. Things were all just –I worked at the Service Drug, which is Big Ed’s. I was a soda jerk there, worked for Doc McGinley. He owned part of it. I guess he had Hoskins from Clinton owned them. And I worked for him down at the Elm Grove drugstore.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Mr. Jim McMahon, Sr. work in there when you worked there?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – yeah, Doc McMahon.
MR. HUNNICUTT: He later opened the Jackson Square Pharmacy.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. And then somebody was there, and I’d know the name if I heard it. But he moved down to Downtown in 1955 when it opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yeah. Williams Drugstore moved from the corner on the other side …
MR. NORMAND: That’s who it was. It was Williams.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then Mr. McMahon opened the pharmacy.
MR. NORMAND: Right, Williams was the guy’s name – the pharmacist’s name.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type movies were shown at the Ridge in Center?
MR. NORMAND: Doris Day and people like that – and westerns, of course. You got all kinds of good westerns – “The Lone Ranger and Tonto” and Tom Mix and things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember home delivery of milk?
MR. NORMAND: Sure, Broad Acres Dairies and Norris Dairies. I think Norris – no, Broad Acre, I guess it was – would deliver, but they couldn’t do it until after the city opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about collecting Coke bottles? You ever collect Coke bottles and lightning bugs for money?
MR. NORMAND: No, I never did. People did. I know that. But I never did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the radio? Did the family listen to radio programs in those days?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. That’s all you had. You didn’t have TV. We would listen to some of the old favorite radio shows. We’d listen to all the boxing matches.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of bicycle did you have?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t remember – Red Rider.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever have a big …
MR. NORMAND: [inaudible], too. Yeah. I remember trying to learn how to tan a hide. I killed a squirrel, and I skinned it in my back yard between Trevose Lane and East Geneva. I tacked it onto a wooden board, thought I’d tan me some leather. I don’t know whatever happened to that, but it never did tan like the Indians did in the movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s probably a different hide. We were talking about standing in line. Do you remember rationing stamps?
MR. NORMAND: Sure, we had A, B, C rations. Sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did the A, B, C stand for? Do you remember?
MR. NORMAND: No, you could get so many groceries with the type of ration you had. I don’t remember what they stood for or who did it because I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t old enough. There were also gas ration stamps, and it seemed like Dad got five gallons a week – something like that – for his car. There was a gas station right behind the Service Drug, right behind Big Ed’s on the corner. That was – you could almost roll down to it if you were out of gas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did the family do in the summertime? Did they take vacations or go places?
MR. NORMAND: Not in those days. We’d go sometimes – we’d go back to Texas for a short period. But Charlie and I – my brother and I were usually at Boy Scout camp all summer. Either there or working at the Oak Ridge pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your troop number when you were in Scouts?
MR. NORMAND: Either 127 or 129. We were the first troop in Oak Ridge. We met in an old log cabin that’s now it’s gone. It was off of Florida Avenue, which is between there and the Turnpike.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Behind the Dollar General Store today in that area?
MR. NORMAND: Well, yeah – it’s only a little further east on the other side of Florida, on the east side of Florida. There was a log cabin in there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who the scout master was?
MR. NORMAND: One of them was Kyte – Leanne Kyte’s husband. I can't think of his first name.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I can't either.
MR. NORMAND: I’ve forgotten his name, but that was one of them that we knew.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you just hear about the Scout program, or how did you know about joining the Scouts?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure they came around to the school. It was introduced there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were in the Boy Scouts. Were you ever in the Cub Scouts prior to that?
MR. NORMAND: Yes, in Texas. I’d been in the Cub Scouts. When they would have a rodeo, my mother would dress me up in my Cub Scout uniform, and I’d ride a horse in the parade. That was my uniform.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember how Christmas was growing up in Oak Ridge in the early days?
MR. NORMAND: We’d go out and try to find us a tree. Naturally your eyes are bigger than the room when you’re out looking to cut down a tree. We’d go down Warehouse Road across the railroad tracks up in that area. We’d find a tree, and we’d drag it home. Then my dad would have to modify everything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of tree was that?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cedar tree?
MR. NORMAND: Cedar tree mainly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family have a telephone?
MR. NORMAND: We did. We had a telephone.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was it on a party line?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about party lines. What does that mean?
MR. NORMAND: Well, there might be eight people on the same line, and you pick it up and one of the other eight people in different houses could be on it and be busy. But you could sit there and listen to them, just like an extension.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How would you know when to pick the phone up if someone’s calling you?
MR. NORMAND: Well, you had your own ring. It seemed like you’d have different rings – like two shorts and a long, or a short and along, or a long and a short, something like that. I’m not really sure because there weren’t that many phones available for that many people. I guess Dad had one because of his job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall seeing what I call community phones that were out on power posts so X number of families could use the phone?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They had emergency phones like that. Sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember down in the square about fire alarms and various close proximity so you could report fires?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about that? What type of alarm was it – a pull box?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, a pull box as I recall. It really wasn’t – I don’t remember a lot about that because that wasn’t important to me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about rolling stores throughout Oak Ridge in the early days?
MR. NORMAND: Not a whole lot, not in the early days.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about – Oak Ridge had legalized liquor at one time here in town for a short period of time. Do you remember about the Edgemore Bridge that they were going to have a liquor vote over in Claxton School, and the day before the vote the bridge was condemned, so it didn’t pass? Then some time later, the vote came up again, and the bridge wasn’t condemned, and the liquor passed.
MR. NORMAND: No kidding. I don’t remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s quite a story I was told. How long did the family live on East Geneva?
MR. NORMAND: Until 1947, and then we moved up to Oneida Lane into an F house – 109 Oneida.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe what an F house looks like?
MR. NORMAND: It looks like a large C. It was the largest square footage of any of them. Instead of a rectangular shape, it was an L shape. The C house was also that way. But the F had larger bedrooms, larger living room, two baths, and the one we had at the end of Oneida had an electric furnace. So we didn’t have coal in that house. There were either 10 or 11 – that was the story I recall – electric furnaces in. They were doing it on an experimental basis for heating – nothing for cooling, other than the fan, the blower.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If you go to the top of Georgia, you go left …
MR. NORMAND: You go left and turn right the first street. That’s Oneida.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is that the same street that Col. Nichols lived on, or do you recall?
MR. NORMAND: No, I thought he lived back up on Ogden, back to the right and above Outer Drive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’m not sure. I was under the impression that he lived on that particular street, but I may be wrong.
MR. NORMAND: No, well – who lived there with us was E.O. Walland, Dr. Walland, and – what’s name? The guy that was head of Y-12 – Clarence Larson. They were on each side of us. Are you sure that that general didn’t live on East Geneva?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, I’m not sure. That’s why I was asking.
MR. NORMAND: The reason – we lived at 108, and they went 100, 102, 104 and skipped to 108. There were some Army officers on 102 or 104 East Geneva, and I’m not sure. I kind of had a thought that he might have lived in there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You might be right.
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I don’t know either. When you were going to Oak Ridge schools, do you recall having air raid drills?
MR. NORMAND: Air raid drills?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mm-hm.
MR. NORMAND: Not really.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That probably came after the …
MR. NORMAND: We may have, but I don’t remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Y-12 have the Y-12 big toots horn for shift changes when you were growing up?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah, they’d have those.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when they would blow that horn?
MR. NORMAND: I guess at what would have been …
MR. HUNNICUTT: The start of each shift and …
MR. NORMAND: Every eight hours – 8, 4, and 12.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, March 1949, they opened the gates. Well, let’s back up a minute. In 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Japan, do you recall that event?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. Man, did I sell the papers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that.
MR. NORMAND: You couldn’t get enough papers to sell. Everybody wanted one. They were everywhere, all over – Ed Wescott’s got a huge picture, a beautiful picture with the war ends and all kinds of people – kids and adults everywhere. I don’t even know for sure where he made that picture.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It was in the square – two shots, one by the Ridge Theater and then down on Tennessee below that. Were you in that crowd?
MR. NORMAND: Probably. I never have picked myself out, but I would have been so little I couldn’t. I was mainly selling papers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How much were papers selling for?
MR. NORMAND: They’d give you about anything. They probably were selling for a dime – a nickel or a dime. But people would give you whatever they had to get a paper.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what your parents said about when it was announced about the bomb being dropped?
MR. NORMAND: Well, my dad knew about it. He knew what they were doing because of his job. So he was very aware of what it was and what had happened, and was awful glad it was over.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The secrecy in Oak Ridge was quite strict, wasn’t it?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. One thing that we always kidded. There was a fellow running for president named Wendell Wilke, and everybody got it going that they were making Wilke buttons at the plant.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There were a lot of stories about different things they were making.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In March 1949, they opened the gates to the city and had a big hoopla here. Tell me what you remember about that.
MR. NORMAND: I was in the band, and we marched from Jackson Square down to East Elza Gate. And Rod Cameron – drunker than a skunk, big movie star – riding a horse, and the horse crapping all over the street in front of us; us having to dodge road apples there in Jackson Square. They finally got him off the horse before he killed himself. Who was the vice president? Alvin Barkley – he was the one who was here. The president didn’t come, but Barkley did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the other movie stars that were here?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. Jane Mansfield was it? No. I know my sister-in-law, Vivian McKenzie – Marie McDonald.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Body McDonald?
MR. NORMAND: Marie “the Body” McDonald. She modeled her bathing suit in some kind of fashion show. I don’t remember. That was about the only two I remember really who were here, and Barkley.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the Elza Gate opening?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were there with the band. Obviously you did. What do you remember about that?
MR. NORMAND: There was a big crowd. They cut the ribbon with some kind of fusion technique – you know, not with a scissor, burned it in two.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It was a magnesium ribbon, I believe.
MR. NORMAND: Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When the gates opened, the crowd outside in cars and buses and everything came through.
MR. NORMAND: They were allowed to come in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you were at the gate, where did the band go from there?
MR. NORMAND: I assume we marched back to the high school, which was there in Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They had a parade that same day, which started down in the Turnpike where the Civic Center middle town was. You were in that parade – whether you remember it or not. The high school was in it.
MR. NORMAND: We didn’t get into it until up at Jackson Square. It was where we joined it. That’s where Rod Cameron’s horse showed up – him and his horse.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how many people attended the parade?
MR. NORMAND: No, but here were a large amount. It was a big gathering.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After the parade, did you go to any other functions related to the gate opening?
MR. NORMAND: No, not that I remember, except going up to the high school football field. You know – where they had all the speeches and dignitaries.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the band perform there? Or were you just there?
MR. NORMAND: I was just there. I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the weather that day? Do you recall? Was it cool in March?
MR. NORMAND: It was not rainy. It was okay. We didn’t have any heat problems or anything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you tired from marching to Elza Gate?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure we were. But as kids, you run the roads from morning until night. That didn’t bother you. You can go down there without any problem. We’d walk from there to East Geneva to Elm Grove every morning – and back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, the American Museum of Atomic Energy opened that same weekend. Did you ever attend that museum down on Jefferson?
MR. NORMAND: No. I did, yes – down there, but not at that particular time. I went into it when I was out at Jefferson, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you visit that part of town very much? Most everybody stayed in their section of town, didn’t they?
MR. NORMAND: No, I never did get down there hardly at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive-In? Did you ever go there?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. I went there often, of course. That was the only drive-in theater to go to. I never did work there, but we used to go and get a car full of people and go out there. We’d sometimes take chairs and set them outside our car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were going to high school, did you date very much in high school?
MR. NORMAND: Probably more than I should have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you go on dates?
MR. NORMAND: Well, we’d usually just go to what we called the Wildcat Den.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located?
MR. NORMAND: It was on Central Avenue right below Jackson Square, where there was a big cafeteria. And at the end of that, I guess it’s where Orkin used to be. There was a wooden building, and it was our Wildcat Den for our high school. We’d usually always go there. They had Ping-Pong tables set up, pool tables set up, dancing in the backend. It was sort of like where you are down at the Wildcat Den or the old one at the Midtown community. It’s a similar setup to that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It moved from Central …
MR. NORMAND: But we didn’t have a kitchen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Shep Lauter – was he over there?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – Shep Lauter.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Shep Lauter?
MR. NORMAND: He was just a great guy. He was one of us. His wife was named Amanda, and they were just wonderful people. He kept fights down. He kept problems down, and everybody liked him. They didn’t want to make Shep mad at them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after the Wildcat Den, did you ever go to the Snow White Drive-In?
MR. NORMAND: Of course.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. NORMAND: It was there on Tennessee and East Division Road, across from it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mean the Turnpike?
MR. NORMAND: The Turnpike, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: About where the entrance to the hospital is now?
MR. NORMAND: Right. There was a dental health building on the corner, and next to it was the Snow White.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the Snow White. I’ve heard about the Snow White from different people. Tell me your version of it.
MR. NORMAND: Well, that was just a good place to go and eat and good food, good hamburgers. And you could circle the Snow White in your car until you found the girl you wanted, and try to pick her up. And off you’d go.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have curb hop?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t think so. I don’t believe they did. I can't remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Oak Ridge Hospital in those days? Did you ever have a need to have to use their services?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They thought I had leukemia, and it wasn’t – thank goodness. So I went to the hospital a time or two.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel like you had good service?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. There was – you didn’t know any better. And where you’d come from, you didn’t have as good.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the hospital was like everything else in the city – the best they could have at the time?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They had good hospital, good facility, good doctors, tried to have good ones.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How would you rate your education in the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. NORMAND: I’d rate it very good because it was. It was more just like it is today. You get what you want to out of it. If you wanted to get a real good education, it was there for you. If you didn’t, it wasn’t there for you. They didn’t force you, and you might get a C grade and pass and be able to graduate. I didn’t have that luxury because all my life I knew I was supposed to go to college because my mother and father were college educated and professors. That was just part of life.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you graduated from high school, what did you do for your education?
MR. NORMAND: I went to – the first year I went to University of Chattanooga in Chattanooga. The second year I went back, which was the fall of ’50. I had enrolled in the Marine Corps and the reserve to make a little extra money. When I was down there, they called me, sent me a big brown envelope – “You will report to Paris Island.” So I got out of school. They gave me my money back. I went to Paris Island. When I got out of the Marine Corps in ’52, I came back and went to UT from then on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your wife?
MR. NORMAND: I met her at the swimming pool in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Before you graduated?
MR. NORMAND: In 1952. We got married in ’52.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was her name?
MR. NORMAND: Helen Grabeel. She was from Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Had she been in Oak Ridge long?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, no. She had come to visit some of her friends from Lincoln Memorial that were here in the summer. I met her at the swimming pool. That was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year and date did you get married?
MR. NORMAND: ’52.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember where it was that the marriage was held?
MR. NORMAND: Up in Rose Hill, Va. – Lee County, which is just about the most southwest county in Virginia. It’s where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia join at – the Cumberland Gap in the middle of [inaudible]. When you go into Virginia, that’s Lee County, and she was from right there – about 15 miles or so up into Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up and ask the question – when you parents came to Oak Ridge, did your mother ever comment about what this godforsaken place was that your father brought her to or anything like that?
MR. NORMAND: No, she wasn’t that way. She was – she and my dad [inaudible] perfect. They didn’t have any concern that way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many years did they live in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Well, they lived – he built a house out off of Gwinn Road in 1955, and they lived out there until he died when he was 80. And then she lived in the town into a one-bedroom brick apartment and stayed there until she stayed with my sister – at that time was in San Diego. So she was – we set it up that she’d live with me six months and live with my sister six. So she lived with my sister one six-month term. The rest of the time she lived with Helen and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So she was basically Oak Ridger for life?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you married your wife and came back to Oak Ridge I presume?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you live?
MR. NORMAND: In a one-bedroom flattop on Hutchinson Place right off of Hillside.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the flattop for me.
MR. NORMAND: They were just a square box made out of plywood, flat roof, one bedroom, one living and dining area, little tiny kitchen, and a little tiny bathroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you lived there, what was your job? Where did you work?
MR. NORMAND: I was going to UT, but I also worked for MSI and I was – we had an afterschool program, where we would take kids after grade school and keep them until 8 p.m. We had activities for them. When we could be outdoors, we would play softball, baseball and all that, soccer – not soccer, softball, baseball, volleyball. Indoors, we played basketball and dodge ball. And I had dance classes and things of that sort. The city – MSI did that for after school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many children did you have?
MR. NORMAND: Probably as many as 30 on up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Different age groups?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your children that you and your wife had? How many did you have, and what are their names?
MR. NORMAND: We had – the first one was our daughter named Ginger. Then we had David. Then we had Nancy. Then we had Robert. Then we had a daughter named Missy, and she died six years ago of breast cancer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did the family move to out of the flattop?
MR. NORMAND: To a two-bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Flattop?
MR. NORMAND: To a two-bedroom flattop. That’s where I was when I was going to UT when I graduated. We had one child then and one on the way. Then I bought a C house. I graduated in 1955 in December, and I bought a C house over on Darwin Lane – the corner of Darwin 101 and lived there for a while. Then we wound up going to Miami, Fla. for three and a half years with a company – Motorola. Then back to Oak Ridge, and I bought that D house on Valetta Lane in either ‘69 or ’70. I lived there for 30-some years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So did your children go through the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they feel the same way you did about the education level in the schools?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure they did – year. Nancy went straight to Memphis to what’s now Memphis University, graduated in four years. David went to school for a while, and then went into the Air Force, and he was in there four years and came back. He got into his schooling in PGA, and he’s been a director and an instructor in the PGA for close to 30 years, I guess. At the present, he’s the director of golf at Fort Campbell there in Kentucky, or Tennessee as the case may be. But he teaches for the PGA a lot of classes over the country for people wanting to become PGA pros. He does a lot of that teaching, and education there for them to get their class A – you know what it is. That’s what he’s been doing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, club pros and things like that.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, all the club pros – not the playing pros. The PGA of America is club pros, and the PGA is tournament pros – two different groups.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Through your whole lifetime, Tom, what do you think the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure the atomic bomb.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s developed from the atomic bomb …
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I can say for sure that you’d be proud of your father and his work that he contributed to the project.
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It sounds like he was a very important man as part of that project.
MR. NORMAND: He was a high-vacuum expert. And when they would introduce him when he would give a speech, they would introduce him as the man who knows everything about nothing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Vacuum being nothing.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. He always got a kick out of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you would like to talk about that you can remember?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know. We’ve been talking about a lot of things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There's so much about Oak Ridge history it’s hard to tell all of it.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe growing up in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – I never – you didn’t lock your doors. You didn’t do anything. Nobody did – until I guess ’55.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think the city’s progressed during the years?
MR. NORMAND: Not as well as it should have. You know, back then you had to work in Oak Ridge to live in Oak Ridge. They got away from that, which was a huge mistake, in my opinion. They used to make all the employees – police department, fire department, city employees – had to live in Oak Ridge. They got away from that, which I think was a big mistake. Maybe they couldn’t keep the people they wanted. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I think it was just breakdowns and backup.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What organizations are you involved with today in the city?
MR. NORMAND: I was on the Planning Commission for almost 30 years. That’s all. I’m done with the city at the moment. I’m thinking about making an application for the Housing Committee. I don't have any ax to grind, but I’m concerned about Highland View. All of the properties – a lot of them not very well maintained. What they’re going to do with the, what they’re talking about doing with them – all the different options that could be. I want to see Oak Ridge grow a little. I don’t want it to be 100,000 again, but I’d like to see it grow to about 35,000 or 40,000 – have better retail. It looks like they may be coming up with some things. This Crossland is a company that looks like they’re doing something with Downtown. They’re doing something with the Alexander, which I cared less about that. That was a historic place, and if they wanted to do it, fine. But that wasn’t a – didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Bu the Kroger shopping center named after Ed Wescott is going to be tremendous. And Ed – I don’t know how he can keep his head up straight with all of that. That’s a fantastic honor.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Aren’t you involved with the ‘43 Club?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – I’m very involved with the ‘43. That’s a club that people who came here in ’43 decided to get together. Now because there are so many of them dead, it has to be laid on the line because 1943 just put the math to it. If you were out of college or if you were 20 years old, in 20 years in ’43 – that’s 57 and 13 is 60. You’d be 80 if you were only 20 years old. Most of the men and women that came were older than that. They’d already gone to college, maybe had already been in the service or out. Now you don’t have any young people. We need them. We need you. We need your wife to participate more. We really meet a lot. It’s a high-dollar club. We meet three times a year, and the dues are exorbitant. They’re $4 a year, and that’s for the family – not for a person. It's no reason a person shouldn’t join. But we don’t do anything. We meet, and it’s mainly we have lunch and try to have somebody speak. It’s just a way for all the old-timers to get together and say “hi” again to people that they may not see during the year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tom, it’s been my pleasure to interview you. Your knowledge about Oak Ridge is just fantastic. I’m sure that this interview will be an asset to someone down the line that may be doing a research paper about living in Oak Ridge. You never know, but I want to thank you again for letting us come into your home and do this interview.
MR. NORMAND: You’re more than welcome.
MR. HUNNICUTT: We appreciate it very much.
MR. NORMAND: You did a good job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You did a good job. Thank you.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: Portions of this transcript have been edited at Mr. Normand’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]

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ORAL HISTORY OF DAVID (TOM) NORMAND
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 19, 2013
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is November 19, 2013. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of Mr. Tom Normand, 108 Plymouth Circle, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take his oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Tom, please state your full name, place of birth, and date.
MR. NORMAND: David Thomas Normand. I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, May 5, 1931. Then we moved immediately to Harrisonburg, Virginia. My father was a professor at what is now James Madison University. At that time, it was Harrisonburg Normal School.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and place of birth?
MR. NORMAND: Charles Ernest Normand, born in Belton, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do remember the date?
MR. NORMAND: He was born probably in 1896, I believe.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your mother’s maiden name? Do remember her place of birth and date?
MR. NORMAND: Her name was Hazel Lucille Major, and she was born out in Ogden, Utah; but she lived in Paris, Missouri, most of her life. She was also – she had a master’s degree in home economics. Dad got his bachelor’s and master’s in physics from the University of Texas the same day. Then he went from there to the University of California at Berkeley and got his PhD in physics in 1930, after which he started teaching in Virginia at Harrisonburg. Then we left there and went to Denton, Texas, and he taught at what was then known as Texas State College for Women. It’s now Texas Women’s University, which is just north of Fort Worth. Pearl Harbor hit December 1941. The phone started ringing, and the people from Berkeley – Oppenheimer and Brody and C.L. Lawrence, who Dad had studied under – were calling him. Before the month was over, he was in Berkeley at their radiation laboratory. That’s where they developed the cyclotron. We went – the family, we – went out in January 1942 to Berkeley. We stayed there a year and a half, and we came back to Denton, Texas. They wanted us there that summer so we would be from Texas and not from California – some kind of security thinking. We came to East Tennessee in July 1943 and moved into a cottage in Gatlinburg – the Northside Cottages – and we lived there for six weeks, waiting on a house to be completed in Oak Ridge, which we moved back into a D house at 108 East Geneva Lane at the end of August 1943. There was my twin brother, who is deceased; and my sister, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back you up just a little bit. Do you remember your grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ names on both sides of the family?
MR. NORMAND: No. I don’t. My dad’s dad, of course, was Normand. His wife – I don’t remember them at all. My mother – her name was Major. She was – I’ll think of it in a minute. I know her name, too. It will come to me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’ll come to you. Do you recall how your parents met?
MR. NORMAND: No, they were both teaching in Missouri.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned family. You have brothers and sisters?
MR. NORMAND: I had a brother. He died. And I have a sister, who retired and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are their names?
MR. NORMAND: My brother was Charles Elliott Normand, and my sister was Mary Major Normand. She married a man named Drake Bush, whose mother taught here in Oak Ridge schools at one time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where do you fall in the age of the siblings? Are you the oldest or the littlest?
MR. NORMAND: I am the oldest. My brother and I were twins – identical twins. I’m 82, and my sister is 77.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about school before coming to Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: I went to a little school there in Denton, Texas. The best school was in California in Berkeley. It was much advanced and not as country, so to speak – in Berkeley, Calif. Then we came here – interestingly we enrolled. We walked from East Geneva. The Service Drugstore was there on the corner, which is now Big Ed’s. The Ridge Theater was there, which I guess – I don’t know what it is right today, but those two were the only two buildings there. Then there was a big pit – mud hole – from there all the way up to Jackson Square, and Jackson Square was where you had the A&P store and drugstore and so forth. Across the square, there was a bank – a Hamilton National Bank. Next to it was a beer joint. It was open 24 hours a day, and that’s where we registered for school. It was in the lobby of that little narrow beer parlor, which later became Hall’s Shoe Store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you went to school in California, what do you remember about the classrooms and the teachers? Do you recall any of that?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – they were very nice. We had afterschool activities, all kinds of athletics. They had a big nice playground. It was much more modern than anything I had had a Denton, Texas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What age were you when you went to…?
MR. NORMAND: 12 years old. No, sorry – I was 10 years old when I went to California in 1942.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in Denton, Texas – your education level versus when you went to California, were you ahead, behind…?
MR. NORMAND: They had moved us ahead a year in Texas because I guess they went from 11 grades to 12, and so we had been double-promoted, so to speak. When we got to California, my mother put us back in our age. Instead of being in the seventh grade, I was in sixth grade, which was okay. I didn’t know the difference.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother being a teacher, was she hard on you about you keeping up your grades and your schooling?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t consider that. I felt like she was hard, but that’s what we did. It was just part of everything – everyday life.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What you remember about when you lived in Texas during the summer time? What do you remember doing as far as fun?
MR. NORMAND: Riding horses. The college had a stable, and we would go – we had privileges. I would go out there and just work as a stable hand – feeding horses, saddling them, taking the saddles off, taking care of them, and riding. The instructor was named Branch Williams, and at that time she and her family owned the largest Shetland pony farm in the world. We would go out and ride horses all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you went to California? What kind of activity that you do?
MR. NORMAND: We didn’t have any horses, of course. We went to camps. I went to a camp. I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge with my dad. When it was Show-and-Tell – I told them I went to Valley Joe, and of course that start out to be Vallejo. It got a big chuckle out of the crowd.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about what you remember walking across the Golden Gate Bridge.
MR. NORMAND: I walked across it and thought it would be nice to dive off. I figured you could. But, of course, you couldn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I doubt if the traffic flow was as much in those days as it is today.
MR. NORMAND: Of course not. They wouldn’t be anywhere near that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about transportation when you lived in California? How did the family get around?
MR. NORMAND: Well, we had a car. We had a 1936 Dodge. We got it out there, and we used it. The house we rented was on Oxford Street, which ran right straight down into the University of Berkeley – right into the Campanile into the football field and so forth.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did any of the scientists that your father worked with ever come to the home and visit?
MR. NORMAND: Well, I remember Oppenheimer, and E.O. Lawrence, and a man named it – I can’t think of his first name – Brody. They were all part of my dad’s instructors and workers. I know Oppenheimer and Lawrence have been to Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: This is true. Do you remember what type of people they were? At your age did you…?
MR. NORMAND: No, they were just men that came in. You know…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family know anything about what your father was doing?
MR. NORMAND: No, and boy, oh boy – my brother and I were reading a big – one of those Big Little Books – about yea and that thick. I think they call them Big Little Books, not comic books. Somewhere in there was the word “cyclotron,” and we mentioned that. Boy oh boy – my dad in his very calm way had myself come in and my brother come in separately to the living room, and we talked about the book and found out where it was because he was very concerned that maybe he had let the word slip during a conversation, which was not the case at all. We picked it up in that Big Little Book. I wish I still had it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were your parents strict with the children?
MR. NORMAND: They were not real, real strict. We had quite a bit of latitude. They wanted to trust us, and they did. But we were always – so they knew where we were, and we were home when we were supposed to be. We did our chores, we did our homework. He was raised on a farm – a poor farm in Texas, and everybody had a job to do. That’s the way it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When the family left California, tell me again where the family went to before coming to Oak Ridge.
MR. NORMAND: Dad came directly to Oak Ridge. He got here in March 1943, moved into a dormitory. We went back, and that was interesting. We rode out on a train and came back on a train. It was a treat for us kids because we could order anything we wanted in the dining car, and we did. Everybody looked right after us. We went back to Denton. As soon as we could, we got cabin in Gatlinburg, and came there. I was 12 years old then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did the family get to Gatlinburg from Denton?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t remember. I assume we drove. I assume Dad had a moving van and moved the furniture or the government did. They sent us – we rode a train – you know, I don’t remember whether we had the car out in Berkeley or not because we never – yeah, we had a car. Interestingly, on the train when we arrived in Berkeley in January 1943 – who was Glenn Van Slyck’s main man, that had a car lot? Zach Carringer – Zach Carringer met us at the train station to take us to our house in Berkeley, Calif., when we arrived in Berkeley. He was already there – the government had already had him there to meet the family – my mother and sister and brother and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Whereabouts in Gatlinburg do you remember the house was – the cabin was that you lived in?
MR. NORMAND: North Side Cottages, which you turn left to go up toward Newport.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Have you been by there? Is that facility still there?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. It’s still there. I’ve never gone in and gone through the cabin again, but it’s there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What kind of memories you have living there?
MR. NORMAND: It was fun more than anything else. We would get into muscadine vines and grapes, and we rode horses. They had horses on the main drag then to rent, and we did some of that. That’s basically it. We were only there six weeks, and it was in August – the main month of July and August. Then we got a house here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In that time, was Gatlinburg populated a lot?
MR. NORMAND: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was a just a few stores and that’s about it?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, Ogles was the main store downtown, and Dad would come up every Wednesday and every weekend and be with us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what dormitory your father lived in?
MR. NORMAND: No, but it was one right down there off of Central. It wasn’t one of the ladies’, but it was right there were they were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the family moved to Oak Ridge in the D house. Tell me what a D house looked like in those days.
MR. NORMAND: It was just more of a rectangular shape – three bedrooms. Ours had one bath, but it had plumbing for a second bath, which came later. Today the design – I guess Stone Webster did it. It’s still as popular a design for homes as there is probably anywhere. I would like to have thought I designed the house in 1942 or ‘43 that would still be popular 70 years later. Wouldn’t you?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Absolutely. Do you remember how the house was heated?
MR. NORMAND: Coal furnace.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get the coal?
MR. NORMAND: They delivered it. The government delivered it. They brought a truck full of coal with a chute and would run that chute into the coal bin, and it was the door and the bin in the furnace room, and they would fill that up. They would go onto the next house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The door was outside toward the street so that they…?
MR. NORMAND: Right, and that’s why so many of the cemestos those were built right on the street, so they could get the coal without any problem.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did you do with the ashes out of the coal? Do you remember?
MR. NORMAND: Dad did something with them. We shoveled them and put them in a bucket and put them outside. I think we threw ours down in the woods.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s probably what most all people did.
MR. NORMAND: There was a lot of woods right behind our house. There was woods everywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of flooring was in the house?
MR. NORMAND: All of them had hardwood floors.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you share a bedroom?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, with my brother – I sure did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How close is East Geneva from Jackson Square would you say?
MR. NORMAND: It’s just right down the – it’s wherever you want to start Jackson Square. Do you want to start it up at the actual Jackson Square? I would say it’s quarter of a mile. It wasn’t a long way. Then the high school was right up above Jackson Square – the original high school. We went to Elm Grove, which was the first grade school opened in Oak Ridge. It was still being under construction and the window [inaudible] so we could hear. They would make their turn go way down, and turn and come back, and we would pause again.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What grades did you attend?
MR. NORMAND: I was in the seventh, and then I went into eighth. Then we went to Jefferson Junior as a big senior in junior high in the ninth grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Jefferson located?
MR. NORMAND: It’s where Robertsville is today – where Robertsville Middle School is. That was Jefferson Junior, the only junior high school in town. Then we went from there to the high school, which was on the hill above Jackson Square above the football field.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me what you remember about the Jefferson Junior High down at Robertsville.
MR. NORMAND: It was an old building to begin with, and they added some rooms to it. It was nice as far as I’m concerned. We had good teachers and enjoyed it. It had a gymnasium. It was a small gym, but – Nick Orlando was there. I’ll think of it in a minute – maybe the other…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bob Stuhmiller?
MR. NORMAND: Bob Stuhmiller – yeah, he was there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The old facility was the old Robertsville School that was here before Oak Ridge. Do you remember anything unique about that building?
MR. NORMAND: It was an old stone building, had a lot of steps you had to go up to get into the front door. I remember a lady – our teacher, her name was Miss Edwards, and her son was a national news commentator. I don’t remember his name, but it was Edwards. She was quite a celebrity for us.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about fire escapes? Do you remember anything unique about the fire escape when you went?
MR. NORMAND: It had one on the outside. It was in the ladder. It was a chute, as I recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever go down the chute?
MR. NORMAND: Probably playing in it. I probably did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to Elm Grove School a little bit. What do you remember in the school at Elm Grove as far as your dress when you went to school – what you wore versus when you went to California or Texas?
MR. NORMAND: Well, when I left Texas, we thought we were really uptown. We had brand-new corduroys on and everything, and all we got was laughs. That wasn’t what they wore in California. What they wore, I don’t remember, but it wasn’t corduroys and it wasn’t cowboy boots. We had changed, but when you came to Oak Ridge that’s another story. Everybody was from somewhere else. There weren’t any cliques. There weren’t any better people, poorer people – everybody in the same boat, everybody from somewhere else. We were all equal, and we all got along that way. It was so interesting. We had I think 20-some, we will use a number – 26 students in the first class, and they were 25 different states represented. The reason there were 25 is because my brother and I were both from Texas. But it was that type of a melting pot. It was interesting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember your teachers’ names at Elm Grove?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, Miss Stratton. She later became – I forget her last name now. But she was our teacher, and we had Alice Lyman, who was our music group who stayed in Oak Ridge for years. It was a good, nice group of people – good teachers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you think the school work was harder or about the same or less than when you came from California and Texas?
MR. NORMAND: Now that’s a good question. I never did – we worked about the same amount as far as applying toward homework as we did everywhere because my mother and father were both educators and had both taught college mainly, and they expected us to do a certain level. I’m sure I didn’t live up to their full expectations, but we had our homework done.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like to go to school?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – sure. I enjoyed it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During the summertime when you first came to Oak Ridge in the early days, what did you do for fun and activities when you were growing up then?
MR. NORMAND: Well, when we first got here, we were about 13, and I went to Boy Scout camp three years – once as a camper, and twice continued as a counselor and working in the Waterfront Development, teaching the lifesaving and water safety merit badges, and worked as counselor at Camp Pellissippi up on Norris Lake. And then I eventually started carrying papers – newspapers, delivered them. I delivered – back then, there were so many people coming in. I would deliver routes; build it up to say 100. They would take 50 away. I’d build it back up in another two weeks to 100 because there were so many new people coming in. I had Trevose Lane, which is the – Ed Wescott was one of my customers. He, even to this day, remembers that I was his paperboy. I remembered him fondly. It just – there were headaches to it because people were moving in and out without paying you, and you had to collect from your customers. That wasn’t easy. So when I was 12-years-old, which is when I came, I went to work down at the bowling alley. They had a bowling alley underneath where the Soup Kitchen is today. It was under there. I was setting pins for 8 cents a line. They made me quit because I didn’t have a social security number. That’s where I got my first social security card.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who ran the bowling lanes in those days?
MR. NORMAND: No, I didn’t work there a long time. I was a little small. I hadn’t grown yet. I’d set doubles, and it kind of got to a big old heavy ball and plink pins. It was more than I really needed.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you get the job?
MR. NORMAND: I guess I went down there and talked to him, or had a friend that talked me into it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about setting pins. How did you do that?
MR. NORMAND: Man, strictly gathering them up in your hands and throwing them in the rack and hopping to the next one, and doing the same thing, and trying to dodge when the ball would come and the pins would fly – not trying to dodge the pins. It wasn’t a lot of fun. We didn’t have any automatic pin-setters. You’d throw them in the rack, and then you’d have to press it down to set them on there and release it. For a little fellow, it wasn’t too easy. Then I took advantage of the swimming pool, and I started working at the Oak Ridge swimming pool as a basket room attendant. I got my – when I got a little bit older, I got my senior – junior and senior lifesaving. I started helping out with the teaching program, and I was teaching. And the Red Cross paid my way and sent me to national aquatic school in Brevard, North Carolina, when I was 18. You had to be 18 to be a water safety instructor – to get my water safety instructor’s job. I headed that Red Cross program for three years – the largest swimming program in the nation. We had an excellent program at the Oak Ridge pool, and I was a lifeguard then. I had gotten over and I was a lifeguard. I went into the Marine Corps and got out in 1952, came back and was head lifeguard. Then I was the manager when we integrated. The previous manager didn’t want that job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back up and explained to me what a basket – what did you say?
MR. NORMAND: A basket room attendant. People would come in and they would get a basket – a metal basket, and it would have a tag on it that you would slip on your wrist or ankle, and you get dressed. That’s where you would put your clothes. You would put the basket back to the basket room attendant, and he would put it up and a number. They keep your clothes for you. You can get out of the swimming hole, and then you come and get your clothes and re-dress and turn the basket in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If I remember right, it was the little elastic sort of band that had the round number on it.
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What else do you remember unique about the Oak Ridge swimming pool?
MR. NORMAND: Well, it was fed by spring, and it was cold water.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall down on the west end of the pool outside ever being an eating facility or maybe a little carnival rise or something of that nature?
MR. NORMAND: They had a diner out there as I recall – not originally. Originally it was wooden. Then when they built the swimming pool – put in the men and women’s bathhouses, they had stuff there, but they really had the food area up on the backside of the pool toward the road, where the boilers were inside the building, the change house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work there before they concreted the pool? It was just more about…
MR. NORMAND: One year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mud bottom?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, and it was a plastic or mud bottom. That was the first year I worked there, which was probably 1946 or 1947. Then they concreted it in and put in the chlorinators and all the pumps, which were right behind the diving boards – the chlorinator. We had filters – huge filters. We would have to wash them occasionally – flush them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how much it cost to go swimming?
MR. NORMAND: 9 cents – I believe. That’s what it cost to go to the movie. It might’ve been 12 or 14 cents or 15. It wasn’t expensive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you working at the pool when they had what I call entertainment, where some guys would dress up like clowns and jump off the diving board?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. I was part of that on occasion. I wasn’t as good as some of the others. Some of them were very good. They put on a clown act, dress up, get on top of the high board, stagger around, fall off.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who those fellows were?
MR. NORMAND: There was Bobby Seifred was one that did that. I don’t remember for sure – Mac Preston.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to the home life. Do you remember where your mother did her grocery shopping?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, the only place we had. That was the A&P store there at Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the community store being there in the square as well?
MR. NORMAND: There was a community store. Was it at Jackson Square?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yeah. It was up in the corner on the square, where Razzleberry’s is today.
MR. NORMAND: Okay, well – then that’s where she did her shopping.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The A&P was down …
MR. NORMAND: The A&P was down further. You see, in those days Elm Grover had a little shopping center. Outer Drive had a little shopping center. Pine Valley had a little shopping center. Each one of these little shopping centers had a one-truck fire hall, a drugstore, a grocery store, a men and women’s hair salon. There was one across the street from Elm Grove School, one across from Pine Valley. There was not one up at Cedar Hill, but there was one on Outer Drive – Outer Drive Shopping Center.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go with your mother when she did her grocery shopping?
MR. NORMAND: Sometimes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember standing in line for certain items?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. You’d have to. My uncle – my mother’s brother – was a bird colonel in the Army. When he would come, we would get treats because he could go to the PX – I guess they called it – where the Army was stationed, and could get things that we couldn’t buy. They weren’t available. So we wanted Uncle Earl to come all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family have a car in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. We had a 1936 Dodge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your father got back and forth to work?
MR. NORMAND: He drove it sometimes. Then he was in a car pool – mainly a car pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What facility did he work at?
MR. NORMAND: Y-12. He worked for Oak Ridge National Lab, but in the Y-12 area.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned earlier that Oppenheimer came to Oak Ridge, as well as Ferme and some of the other people. Did any of those come and visit the family?
MR. NORMAND: That I don’t know. I’m not positive whether – I would think they did – Oppenheimer and – I can't even think of the other one’s names. Not Ferme…
MR. HUNNICUTT: E.O. Lawrence?
MR. NORMAND: E.O. Lawrence.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about when you went to Jefferson? How many grades were at Jefferson before you went to the high school?
MR. NORMAND: Just the one.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Ninth grade?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. We were the ninth grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then you went to the high school, which was above Jackson Square on Kentucky Avenue. What was the difference when you left junior high and you went to high school?
MR. NORMAND: Well, not a whole lot. I was trying to be a football player, and all I was was fodder, but I did dress out and go every day. Then I also played in the band. I played a baritone horn – in the high school band. So I did both while I was in school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was the band director at that time?
MR. NORMAND: Good question. I thought you might ask, and I don’t know. I know Miss Lymon was down at the junior high.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, Mr. Scarborough was the band director …
MR. NORMAND: That’s who it was – Prop Scarborough. We called him Prop.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now in high school, they offered shop classes. Did you take any of those?
MR. NORMAND: No. They offered it – yes, but I didn’t take any.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Who was the football coach?
MR. NORMAND: Ben Martin, and then [Buste] Warren. He had just graduated from Tennessee and was a tailback for them. He came, and that’s when we graduated.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that you graduated?
MR. NORMAND: 1949.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the 1949 football team – some of the players on that team?
MR. NORMAND: This would have been the 1948 team.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Or 1948?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah – Buddy Pope, Bebe Hopkins, Bob Geiser, Dick Williams. I remember several of them – Tom Twitty.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What position did you play?
MR. NORMAND: I tried to play linebacker and fullback.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you get to play much?
MR. NORMAND: No. I didn’t play much and didn’t get to …
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember traveling to any of the away games?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. We would go to some of the away games – not very far. We would go to Clinton and Oliver Springs. I think we played – I’m sure we did – Lafollette. And we’d play Rule High School in Knoxville and [Stairtech] in Knoxville and things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In those days, the city was fenced in. Security was very high. My understanding is that children and parents had to have security ID badges.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe above the age of – was it 13 or 12?
MR. NORMAND: When I first came, I had one. I was 12, so maybe that’s what it was. The badges were just picture badges with your number on them. I’ve heard somebody tell somebody on the train out there that you ride, and that there were different colored badges, and you couldn’t even go from one section of town to the other, which wasn’t true at all. We played – Elm Grove played Linden, which was about as far west as you could get. You know – different schools, different playgrounds.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, what was the requirement with that badge? Did you have to wear it only when you went out of town?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. It was for to go in and out of the gate. They may have wanted us to wear it all the time, but we didn’t.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned the elementary schools playing each other. Was that during the summer programs?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What kind of games did you play?
MR. NORMAND: Softball mainly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Each elementary school had a summer program for children?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Other than softball, what were some of the other things they offered?
MR. NORMAND: Well, that’s really about – I didn’t partake in whole lot of it for the simple reason I was in [bob moring] swimming. I was at the pool or up at Camp Pellissippi on Norris Lake.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Back to the ID badge. Do you remember where your family had to go to get that badge?
MR. NORMAND: Right down there where my nephew’s law office is today, which is known as the Town Hall building. We went right down there. They would take your picture, give you the badge, and off you’d go.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the badge was just made right on spot while you waited?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm, as I recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what your number was?
MR. NORMAND: I had a low number at one time – 329.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That is low. Did you ride the bus system much in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. That’s the only way we got – that or ride our bicycles or walk.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you first moved in on East Geneva, were the roads paved or were they just tar and gravel?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, no. They were not – they were gravel and mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the boardwalks? Tell me about the boardwalks.
MR. NORMAND: They were everywhere through the woods. At the end of East Geneva, why you’d pick up a boardwalk, and you could even go north all the way up to the top of Georgia – well, to Gorgas Lane, which was the last lane on the right. You could turn off and go to Forest Lane off Florida. You could turn onto Faunce and Fairview, and come out down on Fairview. That’s the main ones I knew about because that’s where I lived, you know. They didn’t have a boardwalk all the way – you’d have to go to Tennessee Avenue to walk to Elm Grove. Of course, we could walk through people’s yards, and they didn’t mind. Nobody owned anything. You know, all the houses were government-owned.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That brings up an interesting thing that I’ve heard about when they was building the houses in that area. Kids would go to Elm Grove like you, and they was building houses so fast. When you came home, sometimes you’d get lost because the houses went up and you didn’t recognize.
MR. NORMAND: That’s true. They were putting them up – and awful lot of houses every day, new ones. They started in the east end. Then, as you know, they laid Oak Ridge out with the alphabet. The A streets were all on the east end, and they graduated until they got to Pennsylvania. That was the furthest on the west end – was the P’s. I’m talking about for cemestos. They would have flattops on West Outer Drive and down on Hillside and off of Hillside and so forth. But all the cemestos started on California actually. Those in East Village weren’t cemestos, as I recall – not an A, B, C, or D, or F. They were something else, and I don’t know what.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They were G’s and H’s.
MR. NORMAND: Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They didn’t have a chimney out the top – a fireplace.
MR. NORMAND: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They were normally by the Glenwood Baptist Church …
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Riding the bus system, where did you go to catch the bus if you were going somewhere in town?
MR. NORMAND: About anywhere. And they were pretty much free. You could hop on a bus anywhere. They had them running all over town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have transfers that you could go from one bus to another?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. If you needed one – I don’t remember riding the bus very often, to tell you the truth. I’m not sure how I got from East Geneva down to Jefferson Junior. I’m sure it was a school bus that came and picked us up in our neighborhood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what times you had to be at school and what times school got out?
MR. NORMAND: We started at 8 a.m. That was what I recall. We got through at around 3.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were going to Jefferson down at Robertsville, you mentioned they had a cafeteria. Did you buy food there? Or did you take your lunch?
MR. NORMAND: I guess we did both. I ate an awful lot of tuna fish and cheese sandwiches made at home.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how your mother washed her clothes when you first came to Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: No. I’m sure we had a washer – and old ringer type; and probably had it hooked up in the utility room.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Hung the clothes outside?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. The town was opened in March of 1949 when they opened the gates. So people could start coming in and out then. But there wasn’t any private property until – what? – 1955.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall going to the indoor movie theaters?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. I worked at the Ridge Theater. And I could get in – like I said, I was small. I would get in for 9 cents until I was 14.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your job at the Ridge Theater?
MR. NORMAND: I was an usher and ticket-taker.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What are the duties of an usher? What do they do?
MR. NORMAND: Just try to keep people from causing disturbances and keeping people from enjoying the movie. We’d have a flashlight and help anybody that needed to see. Then we’d take up tickets at the front, and then the same thing at the Center Theater, which was in Jackson Square. I only worked at those two theaters. Things were all just –I worked at the Service Drug, which is Big Ed’s. I was a soda jerk there, worked for Doc McGinley. He owned part of it. I guess he had Hoskins from Clinton owned them. And I worked for him down at the Elm Grove drugstore.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Mr. Jim McMahon, Sr. work in there when you worked there?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – yeah, Doc McMahon.
MR. HUNNICUTT: He later opened the Jackson Square Pharmacy.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. And then somebody was there, and I’d know the name if I heard it. But he moved down to Downtown in 1955 when it opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yeah. Williams Drugstore moved from the corner on the other side …
MR. NORMAND: That’s who it was. It was Williams.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then Mr. McMahon opened the pharmacy.
MR. NORMAND: Right, Williams was the guy’s name – the pharmacist’s name.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type movies were shown at the Ridge in Center?
MR. NORMAND: Doris Day and people like that – and westerns, of course. You got all kinds of good westerns – “The Lone Ranger and Tonto” and Tom Mix and things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember home delivery of milk?
MR. NORMAND: Sure, Broad Acres Dairies and Norris Dairies. I think Norris – no, Broad Acre, I guess it was – would deliver, but they couldn’t do it until after the city opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about collecting Coke bottles? You ever collect Coke bottles and lightning bugs for money?
MR. NORMAND: No, I never did. People did. I know that. But I never did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the radio? Did the family listen to radio programs in those days?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. That’s all you had. You didn’t have TV. We would listen to some of the old favorite radio shows. We’d listen to all the boxing matches.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of bicycle did you have?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t remember – Red Rider.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever have a big …
MR. NORMAND: [inaudible], too. Yeah. I remember trying to learn how to tan a hide. I killed a squirrel, and I skinned it in my back yard between Trevose Lane and East Geneva. I tacked it onto a wooden board, thought I’d tan me some leather. I don’t know whatever happened to that, but it never did tan like the Indians did in the movies.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s probably a different hide. We were talking about standing in line. Do you remember rationing stamps?
MR. NORMAND: Sure, we had A, B, C rations. Sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did the A, B, C stand for? Do you remember?
MR. NORMAND: No, you could get so many groceries with the type of ration you had. I don’t remember what they stood for or who did it because I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t old enough. There were also gas ration stamps, and it seemed like Dad got five gallons a week – something like that – for his car. There was a gas station right behind the Service Drug, right behind Big Ed’s on the corner. That was – you could almost roll down to it if you were out of gas.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What did the family do in the summertime? Did they take vacations or go places?
MR. NORMAND: Not in those days. We’d go sometimes – we’d go back to Texas for a short period. But Charlie and I – my brother and I were usually at Boy Scout camp all summer. Either there or working at the Oak Ridge pool.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall your troop number when you were in Scouts?
MR. NORMAND: Either 127 or 129. We were the first troop in Oak Ridge. We met in an old log cabin that’s now it’s gone. It was off of Florida Avenue, which is between there and the Turnpike.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Behind the Dollar General Store today in that area?
MR. NORMAND: Well, yeah – it’s only a little further east on the other side of Florida, on the east side of Florida. There was a log cabin in there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember who the scout master was?
MR. NORMAND: One of them was Kyte – Leanne Kyte’s husband. I can't think of his first name.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I can't either.
MR. NORMAND: I’ve forgotten his name, but that was one of them that we knew.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you just hear about the Scout program, or how did you know about joining the Scouts?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure they came around to the school. It was introduced there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were in the Boy Scouts. Were you ever in the Cub Scouts prior to that?
MR. NORMAND: Yes, in Texas. I’d been in the Cub Scouts. When they would have a rodeo, my mother would dress me up in my Cub Scout uniform, and I’d ride a horse in the parade. That was my uniform.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember how Christmas was growing up in Oak Ridge in the early days?
MR. NORMAND: We’d go out and try to find us a tree. Naturally your eyes are bigger than the room when you’re out looking to cut down a tree. We’d go down Warehouse Road across the railroad tracks up in that area. We’d find a tree, and we’d drag it home. Then my dad would have to modify everything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of tree was that?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cedar tree?
MR. NORMAND: Cedar tree mainly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the family have a telephone?
MR. NORMAND: We did. We had a telephone.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was it on a party line?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about party lines. What does that mean?
MR. NORMAND: Well, there might be eight people on the same line, and you pick it up and one of the other eight people in different houses could be on it and be busy. But you could sit there and listen to them, just like an extension.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How would you know when to pick the phone up if someone’s calling you?
MR. NORMAND: Well, you had your own ring. It seemed like you’d have different rings – like two shorts and a long, or a short and along, or a long and a short, something like that. I’m not really sure because there weren’t that many phones available for that many people. I guess Dad had one because of his job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall seeing what I call community phones that were out on power posts so X number of families could use the phone?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They had emergency phones like that. Sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember down in the square about fire alarms and various close proximity so you could report fires?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about that? What type of alarm was it – a pull box?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, a pull box as I recall. It really wasn’t – I don’t remember a lot about that because that wasn’t important to me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about rolling stores throughout Oak Ridge in the early days?
MR. NORMAND: Not a whole lot, not in the early days.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about – Oak Ridge had legalized liquor at one time here in town for a short period of time. Do you remember about the Edgemore Bridge that they were going to have a liquor vote over in Claxton School, and the day before the vote the bridge was condemned, so it didn’t pass? Then some time later, the vote came up again, and the bridge wasn’t condemned, and the liquor passed.
MR. NORMAND: No kidding. I don’t remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s quite a story I was told. How long did the family live on East Geneva?
MR. NORMAND: Until 1947, and then we moved up to Oneida Lane into an F house – 109 Oneida.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe what an F house looks like?
MR. NORMAND: It looks like a large C. It was the largest square footage of any of them. Instead of a rectangular shape, it was an L shape. The C house was also that way. But the F had larger bedrooms, larger living room, two baths, and the one we had at the end of Oneida had an electric furnace. So we didn’t have coal in that house. There were either 10 or 11 – that was the story I recall – electric furnaces in. They were doing it on an experimental basis for heating – nothing for cooling, other than the fan, the blower.
MR. HUNNICUTT: If you go to the top of Georgia, you go left …
MR. NORMAND: You go left and turn right the first street. That’s Oneida.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is that the same street that Col. Nichols lived on, or do you recall?
MR. NORMAND: No, I thought he lived back up on Ogden, back to the right and above Outer Drive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’m not sure. I was under the impression that he lived on that particular street, but I may be wrong.
MR. NORMAND: No, well – who lived there with us was E.O. Walland, Dr. Walland, and – what’s name? The guy that was head of Y-12 – Clarence Larson. They were on each side of us. Are you sure that that general didn’t live on East Geneva?
MR. HUNNICUTT: No, I’m not sure. That’s why I was asking.
MR. NORMAND: The reason – we lived at 108, and they went 100, 102, 104 and skipped to 108. There were some Army officers on 102 or 104 East Geneva, and I’m not sure. I kind of had a thought that he might have lived in there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You might be right.
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I don’t know either. When you were going to Oak Ridge schools, do you recall having air raid drills?
MR. NORMAND: Air raid drills?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mm-hm.
MR. NORMAND: Not really.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That probably came after the …
MR. NORMAND: We may have, but I don’t remember.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Y-12 have the Y-12 big toots horn for shift changes when you were growing up?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah, they’d have those.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember when they would blow that horn?
MR. NORMAND: I guess at what would have been …
MR. HUNNICUTT: The start of each shift and …
MR. NORMAND: Every eight hours – 8, 4, and 12.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, March 1949, they opened the gates. Well, let’s back up a minute. In 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Japan, do you recall that event?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. Man, did I sell the papers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about that.
MR. NORMAND: You couldn’t get enough papers to sell. Everybody wanted one. They were everywhere, all over – Ed Wescott’s got a huge picture, a beautiful picture with the war ends and all kinds of people – kids and adults everywhere. I don’t even know for sure where he made that picture.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It was in the square – two shots, one by the Ridge Theater and then down on Tennessee below that. Were you in that crowd?
MR. NORMAND: Probably. I never have picked myself out, but I would have been so little I couldn’t. I was mainly selling papers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How much were papers selling for?
MR. NORMAND: They’d give you about anything. They probably were selling for a dime – a nickel or a dime. But people would give you whatever they had to get a paper.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what your parents said about when it was announced about the bomb being dropped?
MR. NORMAND: Well, my dad knew about it. He knew what they were doing because of his job. So he was very aware of what it was and what had happened, and was awful glad it was over.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The secrecy in Oak Ridge was quite strict, wasn’t it?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. One thing that we always kidded. There was a fellow running for president named Wendell Wilke, and everybody got it going that they were making Wilke buttons at the plant.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There were a lot of stories about different things they were making.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In March 1949, they opened the gates to the city and had a big hoopla here. Tell me what you remember about that.
MR. NORMAND: I was in the band, and we marched from Jackson Square down to East Elza Gate. And Rod Cameron – drunker than a skunk, big movie star – riding a horse, and the horse crapping all over the street in front of us; us having to dodge road apples there in Jackson Square. They finally got him off the horse before he killed himself. Who was the vice president? Alvin Barkley – he was the one who was here. The president didn’t come, but Barkley did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of the other movie stars that were here?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. Jane Mansfield was it? No. I know my sister-in-law, Vivian McKenzie – Marie McDonald.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Body McDonald?
MR. NORMAND: Marie “the Body” McDonald. She modeled her bathing suit in some kind of fashion show. I don’t remember. That was about the only two I remember really who were here, and Barkley.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the Elza Gate opening?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were there with the band. Obviously you did. What do you remember about that?
MR. NORMAND: There was a big crowd. They cut the ribbon with some kind of fusion technique – you know, not with a scissor, burned it in two.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It was a magnesium ribbon, I believe.
MR. NORMAND: Okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When the gates opened, the crowd outside in cars and buses and everything came through.
MR. NORMAND: They were allowed to come in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you were at the gate, where did the band go from there?
MR. NORMAND: I assume we marched back to the high school, which was there in Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They had a parade that same day, which started down in the Turnpike where the Civic Center middle town was. You were in that parade – whether you remember it or not. The high school was in it.
MR. NORMAND: We didn’t get into it until up at Jackson Square. It was where we joined it. That’s where Rod Cameron’s horse showed up – him and his horse.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how many people attended the parade?
MR. NORMAND: No, but here were a large amount. It was a big gathering.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After the parade, did you go to any other functions related to the gate opening?
MR. NORMAND: No, not that I remember, except going up to the high school football field. You know – where they had all the speeches and dignitaries.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did the band perform there? Or were you just there?
MR. NORMAND: I was just there. I don’t know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the weather that day? Do you recall? Was it cool in March?
MR. NORMAND: It was not rainy. It was okay. We didn’t have any heat problems or anything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you tired from marching to Elza Gate?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure we were. But as kids, you run the roads from morning until night. That didn’t bother you. You can go down there without any problem. We’d walk from there to East Geneva to Elm Grove every morning – and back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, the American Museum of Atomic Energy opened that same weekend. Did you ever attend that museum down on Jefferson?
MR. NORMAND: No. I did, yes – down there, but not at that particular time. I went into it when I was out at Jefferson, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you visit that part of town very much? Most everybody stayed in their section of town, didn’t they?
MR. NORMAND: No, I never did get down there hardly at all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive-In? Did you ever go there?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. I went there often, of course. That was the only drive-in theater to go to. I never did work there, but we used to go and get a car full of people and go out there. We’d sometimes take chairs and set them outside our car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were going to high school, did you date very much in high school?
MR. NORMAND: Probably more than I should have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you go on dates?
MR. NORMAND: Well, we’d usually just go to what we called the Wildcat Den.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was that located?
MR. NORMAND: It was on Central Avenue right below Jackson Square, where there was a big cafeteria. And at the end of that, I guess it’s where Orkin used to be. There was a wooden building, and it was our Wildcat Den for our high school. We’d usually always go there. They had Ping-Pong tables set up, pool tables set up, dancing in the backend. It was sort of like where you are down at the Wildcat Den or the old one at the Midtown community. It’s a similar setup to that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It moved from Central …
MR. NORMAND: But we didn’t have a kitchen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did Shep Lauter – was he over there?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – Shep Lauter.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about Shep Lauter?
MR. NORMAND: He was just a great guy. He was one of us. His wife was named Amanda, and they were just wonderful people. He kept fights down. He kept problems down, and everybody liked him. They didn’t want to make Shep mad at them.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after the Wildcat Den, did you ever go to the Snow White Drive-In?
MR. NORMAND: Of course.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was it located?
MR. NORMAND: It was there on Tennessee and East Division Road, across from it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mean the Turnpike?
MR. NORMAND: The Turnpike, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: About where the entrance to the hospital is now?
MR. NORMAND: Right. There was a dental health building on the corner, and next to it was the Snow White.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the Snow White. I’ve heard about the Snow White from different people. Tell me your version of it.
MR. NORMAND: Well, that was just a good place to go and eat and good food, good hamburgers. And you could circle the Snow White in your car until you found the girl you wanted, and try to pick her up. And off you’d go.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have curb hop?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t think so. I don’t believe they did. I can't remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about the Oak Ridge Hospital in those days? Did you ever have a need to have to use their services?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They thought I had leukemia, and it wasn’t – thank goodness. So I went to the hospital a time or two.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel like you had good service?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah. There was – you didn’t know any better. And where you’d come from, you didn’t have as good.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So the hospital was like everything else in the city – the best they could have at the time?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. They had good hospital, good facility, good doctors, tried to have good ones.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How would you rate your education in the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. NORMAND: I’d rate it very good because it was. It was more just like it is today. You get what you want to out of it. If you wanted to get a real good education, it was there for you. If you didn’t, it wasn’t there for you. They didn’t force you, and you might get a C grade and pass and be able to graduate. I didn’t have that luxury because all my life I knew I was supposed to go to college because my mother and father were college educated and professors. That was just part of life.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you graduated from high school, what did you do for your education?
MR. NORMAND: I went to – the first year I went to University of Chattanooga in Chattanooga. The second year I went back, which was the fall of ’50. I had enrolled in the Marine Corps and the reserve to make a little extra money. When I was down there, they called me, sent me a big brown envelope – “You will report to Paris Island.” So I got out of school. They gave me my money back. I went to Paris Island. When I got out of the Marine Corps in ’52, I came back and went to UT from then on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet your wife?
MR. NORMAND: I met her at the swimming pool in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Before you graduated?
MR. NORMAND: In 1952. We got married in ’52.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was her name?
MR. NORMAND: Helen Grabeel. She was from Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Had she been in Oak Ridge long?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, no. She had come to visit some of her friends from Lincoln Memorial that were here in the summer. I met her at the swimming pool. That was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year and date did you get married?
MR. NORMAND: ’52.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember where it was that the marriage was held?
MR. NORMAND: Up in Rose Hill, Va. – Lee County, which is just about the most southwest county in Virginia. It’s where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia join at – the Cumberland Gap in the middle of [inaudible]. When you go into Virginia, that’s Lee County, and she was from right there – about 15 miles or so up into Virginia.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up and ask the question – when you parents came to Oak Ridge, did your mother ever comment about what this godforsaken place was that your father brought her to or anything like that?
MR. NORMAND: No, she wasn’t that way. She was – she and my dad [inaudible] perfect. They didn’t have any concern that way.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many years did they live in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Well, they lived – he built a house out off of Gwinn Road in 1955, and they lived out there until he died when he was 80. And then she lived in the town into a one-bedroom brick apartment and stayed there until she stayed with my sister – at that time was in San Diego. So she was – we set it up that she’d live with me six months and live with my sister six. So she lived with my sister one six-month term. The rest of the time she lived with Helen and I.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So she was basically Oak Ridger for life?
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you married your wife and came back to Oak Ridge I presume?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you live?
MR. NORMAND: In a one-bedroom flattop on Hutchinson Place right off of Hillside.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe the flattop for me.
MR. NORMAND: They were just a square box made out of plywood, flat roof, one bedroom, one living and dining area, little tiny kitchen, and a little tiny bathroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you lived there, what was your job? Where did you work?
MR. NORMAND: I was going to UT, but I also worked for MSI and I was – we had an afterschool program, where we would take kids after grade school and keep them until 8 p.m. We had activities for them. When we could be outdoors, we would play softball, baseball and all that, soccer – not soccer, softball, baseball, volleyball. Indoors, we played basketball and dodge ball. And I had dance classes and things of that sort. The city – MSI did that for after school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many children did you have?
MR. NORMAND: Probably as many as 30 on up.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Different age groups?
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your children that you and your wife had? How many did you have, and what are their names?
MR. NORMAND: We had – the first one was our daughter named Ginger. Then we had David. Then we had Nancy. Then we had Robert. Then we had a daughter named Missy, and she died six years ago of breast cancer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did the family move to out of the flattop?
MR. NORMAND: To a two-bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Flattop?
MR. NORMAND: To a two-bedroom flattop. That’s where I was when I was going to UT when I graduated. We had one child then and one on the way. Then I bought a C house. I graduated in 1955 in December, and I bought a C house over on Darwin Lane – the corner of Darwin 101 and lived there for a while. Then we wound up going to Miami, Fla. for three and a half years with a company – Motorola. Then back to Oak Ridge, and I bought that D house on Valetta Lane in either ‘69 or ’70. I lived there for 30-some years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So did your children go through the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they feel the same way you did about the education level in the schools?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure they did – year. Nancy went straight to Memphis to what’s now Memphis University, graduated in four years. David went to school for a while, and then went into the Air Force, and he was in there four years and came back. He got into his schooling in PGA, and he’s been a director and an instructor in the PGA for close to 30 years, I guess. At the present, he’s the director of golf at Fort Campbell there in Kentucky, or Tennessee as the case may be. But he teaches for the PGA a lot of classes over the country for people wanting to become PGA pros. He does a lot of that teaching, and education there for them to get their class A – you know what it is. That’s what he’s been doing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes, club pros and things like that.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah, all the club pros – not the playing pros. The PGA of America is club pros, and the PGA is tournament pros – two different groups.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Through your whole lifetime, Tom, what do you think the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?
MR. NORMAND: I’m sure the atomic bomb.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what’s developed from the atomic bomb …
MR. NORMAND: Mm-hm. Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I can say for sure that you’d be proud of your father and his work that he contributed to the project.
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It sounds like he was a very important man as part of that project.
MR. NORMAND: He was a high-vacuum expert. And when they would introduce him when he would give a speech, they would introduce him as the man who knows everything about nothing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Vacuum being nothing.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah. He always got a kick out of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you would like to talk about that you can remember?
MR. NORMAND: I don’t know. We’ve been talking about a lot of things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: There's so much about Oak Ridge history it’s hard to tell all of it.
MR. NORMAND: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you feel safe growing up in Oak Ridge?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – I never – you didn’t lock your doors. You didn’t do anything. Nobody did – until I guess ’55.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think the city’s progressed during the years?
MR. NORMAND: Not as well as it should have. You know, back then you had to work in Oak Ridge to live in Oak Ridge. They got away from that, which was a huge mistake, in my opinion. They used to make all the employees – police department, fire department, city employees – had to live in Oak Ridge. They got away from that, which I think was a big mistake. Maybe they couldn’t keep the people they wanted. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. I think it was just breakdowns and backup.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What organizations are you involved with today in the city?
MR. NORMAND: I was on the Planning Commission for almost 30 years. That’s all. I’m done with the city at the moment. I’m thinking about making an application for the Housing Committee. I don't have any ax to grind, but I’m concerned about Highland View. All of the properties – a lot of them not very well maintained. What they’re going to do with the, what they’re talking about doing with them – all the different options that could be. I want to see Oak Ridge grow a little. I don’t want it to be 100,000 again, but I’d like to see it grow to about 35,000 or 40,000 – have better retail. It looks like they may be coming up with some things. This Crossland is a company that looks like they’re doing something with Downtown. They’re doing something with the Alexander, which I cared less about that. That was a historic place, and if they wanted to do it, fine. But that wasn’t a – didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Bu the Kroger shopping center named after Ed Wescott is going to be tremendous. And Ed – I don’t know how he can keep his head up straight with all of that. That’s a fantastic honor.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Aren’t you involved with the ‘43 Club?
MR. NORMAND: Oh, yeah – I’m very involved with the ‘43. That’s a club that people who came here in ’43 decided to get together. Now because there are so many of them dead, it has to be laid on the line because 1943 just put the math to it. If you were out of college or if you were 20 years old, in 20 years in ’43 – that’s 57 and 13 is 60. You’d be 80 if you were only 20 years old. Most of the men and women that came were older than that. They’d already gone to college, maybe had already been in the service or out. Now you don’t have any young people. We need them. We need you. We need your wife to participate more. We really meet a lot. It’s a high-dollar club. We meet three times a year, and the dues are exorbitant. They’re $4 a year, and that’s for the family – not for a person. It's no reason a person shouldn’t join. But we don’t do anything. We meet, and it’s mainly we have lunch and try to have somebody speak. It’s just a way for all the old-timers to get together and say “hi” again to people that they may not see during the year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tom, it’s been my pleasure to interview you. Your knowledge about Oak Ridge is just fantastic. I’m sure that this interview will be an asset to someone down the line that may be doing a research paper about living in Oak Ridge. You never know, but I want to thank you again for letting us come into your home and do this interview.
MR. NORMAND: You’re more than welcome.
MR. HUNNICUTT: We appreciate it very much.
MR. NORMAND: You did a good job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You did a good job. Thank you.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: Portions of this transcript have been edited at Mr. Normand’s request. The corresponding audio and video components have remained unchanged.]